Where an adult male's penile foreskin is in its prepuce configuration as a glans protecting membrane (with the foreskin's mucocutaneous zone or layer annularly underlying the foreskin's outer skin layer), an annulus is formed and defined, such annulus normally being flexibly closed and being outwardly expandable. The inner periphery of such annulus comprises the outer periphery of the male's penile glans. Since the skin defining the outer periphery of such annulus is mucocutaneous, the environment within such annulus is typically warm and moist, and often undesirably promotes growth and reproduction of colonies of bacterial pathogens such as Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Treponema pallidum or viral pathogens such as human immune deficiency virus and human papillomavirus. Such pathogens tend to be undesirably transmitted to other persons via sexual contact or such pathogens may directly infect the host through tears within the foreskin.
The male's penile foreskin is commonly known to be surgically excised or amputated. Reasons for performing male foreskin circumcision operations are numerous, including social and religious practices, attempts to lessen risks of transmission of pathogens to sexual partners, and relatively medically necessary excisions of foreskins which are in fact infected with HIV. In a known mode of performing a surgical circumcision operation, a circumferentially extending incision or circumcising cut is extended about the male's penile foreskin, such incision passing completely through both the foreskin's outer skin and underlying mucocutaneous layers to form a pair of incised skin edges. In the event such incised skin edges are held in close proximity with each other during healing, the skin sections naturally graft to each other to form a renewed and integral outer skin surface which lacks the excised or amputated foreskin layers, and which no longer forms an annulus about the glans. In order to effectively hold such incised skin edges in close proximity during healing, skin staples or stitches are commonly used.
Utilizing a scalpel for making a circumcising incision, followed by closing the incision through use of skin staples or stitches is typically mechanically cumbersome and complex, and is typically complicated by continuous hemorrhaging during placement of stitching or staples along the incision. From and after the identification of the HIV virus in 1981, such known procedures for surgical circumcisions have been viewed as posing a heightened risk to the surgeon. Direct tactile manipulations of surgical tools such as scalpels, needles, and sutures have always been accompanied by a risk of cutting or piercing the surgeon's fingers, resulting in transmission of a patient's blood bourne pathogens to the surgeon. Where the pathogen is HIV which directly resides within a foreskin being excised, the heightened risk to the surgeon includes a prospect of being afflicted with AIDS which has a high fatality rate. The instant inventive tool performs all skin cutting and skin piercing steps at a tool front end, and allows the surgeon's hands and fingers to reside at the tool's rearward end during the skin cutting and skin piercing steps. Thus, the tool, in addition to simplifying the circumcision procedure and reducing hemorrhaging, advantageously acts as a buffer against transmissions of blood bourne pathogens from the patient to the surgeon by allowing the surgeon's hands and fingers to remain removed from skin cutting and piercing structures.
Accordingly, the instant inventive circumcision tool solves or ameliorates the problems, difficulties, and deficiencies discussed above, by providing tool structures for automatically stapling the male's foreskin along parallel circumferential lines to create a hemorrhage free circumferential incision zone, and by automatically and substantially simultaneously circumferentially incising the foreskin within such zone.